Comment by skywhopper

That would be silly to stick that tightly to a 40 year old standard. They can easily observe the behavior of every other public DNS resolver (they are Cloudflare, so gathering data on such a scale should be easy) and see how they return results.

Honestly, though, I’d be surprised if they actually even considered it. Everything about the article says to me that the engineer(s) who caused this problem are desperately trying to deflect blame for not having a comprehensive test suite. Sorry, but you don’t go tweaking order of results for such a long-standing, high volume, and crucial protocol just because the 40 year old spec isn’t clear about it.